Silent Playgrounds Read online

  It seemed it was almost over. She began to relax now that he wasn’t pushing her for information she didn’t have, wasn’t asking her questions she couldn’t answer, wasn’t making her feel like a culpable fool for keeping information back. It was important to explain that she hadn’t seen either Lucy or Em, but she needed to tell him about the man – the youth? – she had seen near Shepherd Wheel. ‘I only saw one person in that part of the park.’ She sent her mind back to the odd, jumpy feeling the figure had given her. ‘I thought it was someone I knew at first, but …’

  ‘Who was that?’ McCarthy’s tone was bland, but she knew at once she’d made a mistake.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t,’ she said quickly. Too quickly. ‘I just thought it was. At first.’ She could feel her chest start to tighten and the air she was breathing becoming thin and insubstantial. She concentrated. Breathe slowly, evenly. Keep calm. I hold you responsible for this! Her father’s litany. McCarthy just went on looking at her. More prevarication would only make it worse. After all, it hadn’t been Ashley. Her voice came out in uneven jerks, and she had to stop speaking and gulp for air. ‘Just for a moment. I thought … it was Ashley Reid … from the Alpha Project … only it wasn’t …’ It couldn’t have been more unconvincing if she’d deliberately lied.

  McCarthy was working through the computer files. He was angry, and he wanted to talk to whoever had interviewed Suzanne Milner the evening before. He should have done it himself. But they had the information now. At around a quarter past ten, the wheel yard had been open, and someone, a young man answering a particular description, had been around there, actually coming from the direction of the yard.

  He was puzzled as well as angry. He was good at reading people in interview situations, but Suzanne Milner had been strange. Yesterday she’d been fiercely protective of her friend, later she had been almost flattened by shock. Today she had presented the façade of a carefully groomed academic and had managed to get right up his nose. She’d come in, a picture of cool elegance, very different from the old-jeans-and-sweater image she’d projected yesterday. At first he’d interpreted her attitude as hostility. She’d sat there straight-backed, tilting her head and studying her fingernails before she answered each question, shooting quick glances at him and looking away as soon as he met her eyes. She seemed to be treating the whole thing as a game, giving him minimal, uncooperative answers to the questions he needed answering.

  But it was a façade, he’d realized, as the interview had moved on. What he had mistaken for hostility was, in fact, tension, but it seemed more a tension associated with her surroundings than with him. It was almost as if she was having trouble concentrating on the interview at all.

  He looked at his notes. Her confusion about the park – he could accept that. She’d been in shock, focused on finding the dead woman in the water. Her sheer embarrassment at having to admit that she’d been near Shepherd Wheel at the crucial time, and hadn’t mentioned it, had been convincing.

  But had she tried to slide that sighting past him? If so, why mention it at all? It was odd. He’d known there was something else, and he’d been right. Ashley Reid from the Alpha programme. Why were alarm bells ringing in his mind? He knew that name. OK, let’s see what Ashley who wasn’t there might have been doing. Let’s see what he’d been doing the last time he’d been arrested and charged. He typed the commands into the machine, and waited.

  The photograph on the screen showed a young man with heavy dark hair and dark eyes. He looked out at McCarthy with a faint smile, his eyes wary. He was nineteen – a bit older than most of those sent on the programme. McCarthy ran the record back. Reid had served a short youth custody sentence three years ago – got into a fight and glassed his opponent. Most of his other offences were typical of a disruptive juvenile: shoplifting, twoc, minor vandalism. But Reid had moved on to breaking and entering. He had more than one conviction. He should have been sent down. Why the Alpha Project? McCarthy read on. Reid was classified as having ‘learning difficulties’. McCarthy was surprised. The face that looked at him from the photograph didn’t give that impression. He’d been identified as particularly suitable for the experimental programme that was running at the Alpha Project. Not so much bad as easily led, his probation officer had said, the fall guy for more intelligent companions. That had been the argument that had kept him out of prison.

  McCarthy raised a sceptical eyebrow. Then he noticed that Reid had an outstanding charge against him, one that was due to go to court. University campus security had found him late one night in the shadows behind the chemistry building, the route across the car park that made a useful, but lonely, shortcut. He was facing a charge of going equipped for burglary. He’d been carrying a torch, a lock-knife and some heavy-duty adhesive tape. In McCarthy’s eyes, in that location, that wasn’t going equipped for burglary, it was going equipped for rape.

  The world of chemicals is ordered, predictable and, for those who understand it, safe. It was evening, and Simon let his eyes follow the straight lines of the tiles running along the shiny floor, across, making right angles and patterns of squares. Small squares, and larger squares each containing four small squares, and larger squares still each containing four of the smaller squares each containing four of the small squares and on and on forever. Order.

  He mixed the three solutions, acetimide in water, calcium hypochlorate in water, sodium hydroxide careful now in water. Watch the heat! He put the solutions in the freezer.

  There were heavy benches in rows. Strips of light on the ceiling, bright, bright, bouncing off the surface of the glass, the bottles, the tubes, the shapes, the curves. The light mixing and shattering into chaos.

  The important thing was to keep the temperature low. Experiment had shown him that a stainless steel bowl suspended in a mixture of ice and salt worked fine, as long as he was careful and patient. Molecules sit in their patterns, break down on the right stimulus, recombine in patterns that it is easy to predict. Absorbing and beautiful.

  The light reflecting, refracting, lines against the glassware, shattering again and again and again.

  He put the first solution in the bowl, stirring to get the temperature down. Then, slowly, carefully, he added the second, working under the fume hood. Care! Once, once only the order, the ratios, the time, something was wrong, and the disinfectant smell of chlorine began to seep into the room.

  Now he could sit and wait. Two hours. Tonight he’d brought his drawing pad with him. He opened it to a new page. The sheer whiteness, the blankness of it pleased him, and he sat looking at it for a long time. Footsteps on the shiny floor. A face, smiling. Just a face. Faces need to be drawn, carefully delineated in sharp pencil lines to give them meaning. ‘Hello, Simon. I haven’t seen you at …’ Malcolm. Tutor. Tune it out. Not important. The beauty of the white began to evade him, and he picked up his pencil. ‘… so close to your finals.’ Nod. That’s not enough. Say, ‘Yes.’ It was important to get it right in the centre. The pencil began to create a picture, fine lines, fine detail, unclear at first to anyone who can’t see the patterns that have always been so clear to Simon.

  ‘… catching up. This lab’s empty tonight, but Barry’s next door if you need anything. They’ll be locking up at nine.’ Their eyes meeting. Simon, looking away, nodding. Say, ‘OK. All right.’ Footsteps. Door. Gone. Simon looked at the clock, and returned to his drawing.

  Two hours. He added the contents of the third flask now, cool not cold. The solution turned a clear white, like milk, like paper.

  Hours to wait now. Leave, down the shiny corridors and the lights in the ceiling, and the chaos as the people walk here, there, and all the patterns disturbed. Say, ‘Goodnight.’ The security man, old, ‘Night.’ Looking down, not noticing, used to Simon’s comings and goings. Out of sight and back to the room with the shiny floor. Wait.

  Lights out. The security man, back soon. Wait, watch, sleep. Sleep. Dream …

  The torchlight wavering on the path ahead. Fading, as t
hough the batteries were giving up. The rain spattering against them, and a puddle gleaming in the thin light. And on the path ahead … Staggering under the weight as she slumped against him. The stuff had been good, strong. Quiet, be very quiet. The path by the dam, now. The night, black beyond the circle of faint light on the ground. The torchlight catching the rain, shining and glittering. Shining and glittering like the mud in the dam, the thick, black mud and the sucking sounds drawing your feet in and releasing them. And the place where the mud was disturbed, the place where you could dig.

  Oh, no. Please not that. And the gleam colder than the gleam of firelight, making the metal burn with ice.

  Not that! And the soft, muffling sound of the mud in the darkness.

  Simon’s eyes snapped open. That dream again, and now there was another one, rushing along a shadowed path, looking for something that wasn’t there, feeling it hard on his heels, the chaos, the chaos, the chaos.

  He looked at the clock, its black hands on its white face calming him, steadying his breathing. Just a dream, Si. Don’t worry about it. Several hours had passed. It was midnight. The night watchman never came up here so late. Simon began heating the water bath.

  5

  Dennis Allan’s home – once Emma’s home – was a maisonette on the estate overlooking Gleadless Valley. Tina Barraclough got lost on her first attempt to find the address, working her way through the confusing maze of two- and three-storey blocks that studded the valley side. From the distance, the estate gave a sense of openness, of green parkland dotted here and there with buildings whose fronts were multicoloured with fluttering curtains, washing hanging on the balconies, painted doors. From closer up, the decay was more apparent. There was rubbish on the grass, bare, muddy patches. The paintwork on the buildings was peeling. Nearby, the blocks were boarded up. Further down the hill, they were encased in scaffolding, surrounded by the mud and rubble of a building site, tarpaulins and polythene sheeting flapping in the summer breeze.

  The Allans’ block was one that was awaiting refurbishment. Police cars were parked in front of the row of garages that formed a basement to the building. Barraclough pulled up beside them. The doors of the garages were uneven and chipped, decorated with tags and slogans and names: CASSIE B AND CLAIRE D WOZ ERE! BAZ FOR CLAIRE D! SLAGS LIVE HERE. The garages had once been painted in primary colours, red and blue and yellow. Traces of the paint could still be seen.

  Barraclough went up the concrete stairway to the first deck, to number twelve, the Allans’ maisonette. Though the rubbish chute seemed to be jammed, stuck open and overflowing, the stairway itself was swept clean, the front doors painted and most of the windows trim with nets and potted plants. One or two doors were open as people watched the police team arrive, but the doors closed again as quickly when neighbours were approached. Barraclough opened the door to number twelve and went in.

  Having got permission to search the house, Brooke had given instructions for the place to be turned over. ‘I want anything – anything at all that tells you what’s been going on there. Anything that says Emma went back after he says she left, anything that tells us about her. I want the lot.’

  The maisonettes were laid out to a pattern. Barraclough had a friend who lived in a council maisonette on another estate, and she could have found her way round this one with her eyes closed. A kitchen to the left of the front door, a corridor leading into an L-shaped living-room with French windows opening onto a small balcony. Upstairs, a windowless bathroom, a separate toilet, also windowless and smelling faintly of urine. A bedroom and a tiny second bedroom – Emma’s. According to her father, the room hadn’t been touched since she left. ‘I wanted her to think she could come back. I wanted her back,’ he said.

  Emma had been seventeen. Barraclough was twenty-four. She wondered if those seven years would be a big enough gap to make a barrier. She could remember being seventeen. She couldn’t remember seventeen feeling any different from the way twenty-four felt, except that life seemed both easier and more difficult at twenty-four. Barraclough cast her mind back. Seventeen had been rows with her mother about her exams. Had it been arguments about late nights and boys, or was that from when she was younger? Barraclough felt as though she’d been making her own decisions for a long time, but maybe her mind was deceiving her. Seventeen. Emma had lived here with her mother who apparently thought nothing about inflicting her own miseries on her family. Her father – was he the ineffectual ditherer he seemed, or did that pathetic exterior hide a more sinister, more manipulative psyche? Emma must have been unhappy. She’d run away twice. Why had she come back – and why had she finally left?

  Barraclough looked round the small room, trying to get a feel for Emma, get a picture of the living girl, rather than the dead woman on the slab in the mortuary. There was a single bed under the window, and a melamine wardrobe against the wall, the kind that had hanging space and shelves and drawers. It was clean and tidy, and the bed was made up. The room was the room of a younger girl, the room of someone who was growing up, moving on. Emma had not bothered to change or update it. The bedding and curtains were brightly coloured with a cartoon motif – Bart Simpson. Eat my shorts. Emma’s choice? Her mother’s? Either way, the bedding and curtains were faded. They weren’t new. A torn Spice Girls poster was above the bed, something that Emma would probably be embarrassed to own if she had retained much awareness of the room. A photograph of Royal Trux, one that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine, was pinned to the opposite wall.

  Barraclough opened the wardrobe door. A stained fleece dressing gown hung on a hook – it looked too small for Emma to have worn it recently – and a party dress, black, Lycra, very short, halter-neck top. A real jaw-dropper. A RECLAIM THE STREETS flyer was stuck to the inside of the wardrobe door. A pair of old trainers lay on the bottom.

  She pulled open the drawers. There was nothing there apart from a half-empty packet of Rizlas, the card of the packet torn, and the remains of a cigarette. Barraclough picked up some of the tobacco and sniffed it. The undersides and backs of the drawers yielded nothing. She looked round the room again. There was a rucksack on the back of the door. She opened it and looked inside. It was empty apart from a couple of flyers – free parties by the look of things, Smokescreen and DIY Sound System. Underground, deep house. She checked the side pockets of the bag – for a moment, she thought she’d found a diary and her heart jumped, but it was a wallet, the kind you get from banks and building societies for holding cards. She flicked through it. It contained a cash card, a bus pass and a chain store credit card. Odd, for an unemployed teenager. Had Emma been in debt? She flicked through the cards to see if there was anything else in the wallet, and a couple of photographs dropped out. She picked them up. The first one showed a young woman at a party or a disco – the background was dark, with people indistinct in the background. The light – possibly a flash – had caught the woman, and she was laughing and holding her hand up in protest. For a moment, Barraclough thought it must be Emma, but the hair was darker. On the front of the photograph someone – the woman in the picture? – had written TO EM. She turned the photograph over. On the back, in a different hand, it said SOPHE. HULL, ’97. Sophie Dutton?

  The second photograph was a snapshot of a group of people, blurry and out of focus. It looked as though they were setting up some musical equipment. In the foreground, clearer than the other figures, was a woman, about the same age as the woman in the first picture, Sophe, but the picture was older. There was something about the style of clothes, the make-up, that said seventies, and not seventies revival, either. The clothes looked clumsy, without the stylishness of more recent fabrics and designs. Barraclough looked more closely. The woman could be a younger version of a photo she’d noticed downstairs, a very young Sandra Allan. She looked at the other people in the picture, but it was impossible to make out any detail. She turned the picture over. There was a date scribbled in faded ink. It looked like November 197—The last digit was unclear, and
there was another word she couldn’t quite read:—ELVET. Above that, in what looked like more recent ink, someone had written, so WHAT ABOUT THIS? She looked at the photo again. There was something about the woman – girl, really. The way she was standing, awkward, unbalanced. Barraclough frowned. It reminded her of … Of course! The woman in the photograph, the woman who was probably Sandra Allan, was pregnant. She looked at the smudged date again. Sandra Allan had had a child before she had Emma. What had happened to it?

  Dennis Allan’s face flushed as he looked at the photograph that McCarthy passed to him. ‘Do you recognize any of these people?’ McCarthy asked him.

  He shook his head, then said, ‘Sandra, of course. I don’t know …’ He peered at the picture. ‘I don’t recognize any of them,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to tell.’ McCarthy nodded. The photograph was indistinct. ‘I don’t know where this came from,’ he said. He’d known Sandra towards the end of the seventies, he said. He’d been in a band, and Sandra had been the singer for a while. ‘I left in ’77,’ he said.

  McCarthy asked him about Sandra’s pregnancy. Allan’s face flushed again. ‘We lost touch when the band broke up,’ he said. He caught McCarthy’s look and said with real indignation, ‘It wasn’t mine. I wasn’t her boyfriend.’ The band, Velvet, had broken up in ’78, when another member had left. ‘I met Sandra again in ’81,’ he said. ‘We got married in 1982, just before Emma was born.’ His face looked forlorn.